3 - Background II: systemic grammar

Summary

Any work on text generation must give an account of the linguistic theory–adopted or created–on which the generation process operates. This chapter is an introduction to the linguistic theory adopted here–systemic grammar. The linguistic representation plays a particularly important role in this work. Indeed, an understanding of many of the computational text-generation ideas requires an understanding of the underlying concepts in systemic theory.

This introduction to systemic grammar begins with a short history focused on the major contributors: Malinowski, Firth, Hjelmslev and Halliday. Then the goals or aims of systemic grammar are outlined. Some of the concepts from systemic theory which are most relevant to this work are then discussed in detail. Finally, descriptions of the stratification of systemic grammar, and in particular of the semantic stratum, are given.

History

Malinowski (1884–1942)

The origins of systemic linguistics clearly lie in the work of the anthropologist and ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski (e.g. 1923). From Malinowski come two ideas that have had a profound influence on systemic theory. The first is the observation of the inseparability of language and its social and cultural context (Whorf must also be credited as an influence on this point–Kress, 1976, pp. ixx). Malinowski argued that language could only be viewed and explained with reference to the social and cultural milieu. It is important to note the sharp contrast between this starting point of systemic linguistics and the starting point of the structural/formal tradition: that language is a self-contained system (ibid., p. viii). Most importantly here, Malinowski provided the idea of “context of situation” –a description of the contextual factors influencing an utterance.